In a recent conversation, David Libesman of WorkWave sat down with Mike Givlin, President of Pest and Lawn at Ned's Home, to discuss the real-world impact of the Wavelytics data platform.
Q: As a multi-service business growing through acquisitions, what were the main data challenges you faced?
A: We were operating three different core CRMs (PestPac, RealGreen and a custom one) across our business verticals. We struggled to connect all that data to get a unified view, which made it difficult to cross-sell effectively and create a cohesive customer experience.
Q: What was the process like for integrating data from a new acquisition?
A: It was a significant challenge. In the past, it would take 30, 60, even 90 days to migrate an acquired company's CRM into our central system. During that time, we had very limited visibility into the new business's performance, which was a major blind spot.
Q: Your team initially tried building a solution internally. Why did you decide to buy a data platform like Wavelytics instead?
A: Building it ourselves was slow and cumbersome. We chose to buy for several key reasons:
- Cost-Effectiveness: Wavelytics is cheaper than hiring one full-time data employee and provides a much broader, more diverse skillset.
- Broader Expertise: By partnering with WorkWave, we get access to ideas and perspectives from thousands of other businesses in our industry, which is something we could never generate internally.
- Risk Mitigation: If we hire one person and they leave, all the technical knowledge goes with them. With Wavelytics, the expertise is in a shared pool, which protects our investment and operations.
Q: How did Wavelytics, being built on best-in-class tools like Snowflake, allow Ned's to transform its data warehouse practice?
A: Wavelytics fundamentally modernized our data warehouse practice by solving our core integration and centralization challenges. By leveraging the Snowflake component within Wavelytics, we are now able to:
- Unify Disparate Systems: Build a centralized data warehouse that could finally integrate all our siloed data sources
- Accelerate the Development Pipeline: Utilize the power and efficiency of Snowflake to significantly speed up our data development and integration processes.
- Enable a Central Data Hub: Establish a single source of truth for all customer data, which we then deployed across our entire business, allowing us to move faster and fully utilize our data assets.
Q: How has the Wavelytics platform specifically changed your process when you acquire a new company?
A: It's been completely transformational. Now, we can plug the new company's database into the Wavelytics platform at close, and within a day or two, we have all their data flowing through our systems. We can immediately report on it using the same packages we use for our entire business.
Q: You’ve said Wavelytics allows you to "bend time." What does that mean for your acquisition strategy?
A: "Bending time" means we no longer have to wait for a lengthy integration to get critical data. We have a full view of the business starting immediately. This gives our team more confidence, frees up internal resources from manual data aggregation and has allowed us to "open up our acquisition pipeline a bit more" because a major hurdle has been removed.
Q: Beyond acquisitions, how has Wavelytics impacted your day-to-day operations?
A: It has been the key to unifying our entire business. The platform's ability to connect our different CRMs and third-party systems has been crucial for cross-selling and creating a single source of truth. An unexpected benefit is that it exposes all the "noise" in the data very quickly, showing us where systems weren't set up properly. This allows us to improve our data hygiene and clean things up much faster.
Q: How does a unified data platform help your sales and marketing efforts?
A: It's had a direct impact on our bottom line. With integrated tools like Sales Center, we have full pipeline visibility. This leads to much better marketing attribution, which increases our efficiency and drives down our Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) — a critical metric for a private equity-backed business.
Q: Looking ahead, how does Wavelytics fit into your strategy for deploying AI?
A: It's a "natural fit" and foundational to our AI strategy. We're excited for the ability to query our data with simple questions — essentially, to "Google search" our business for problems instead of hunting through hundreds of reports. More importantly, the platform's architecture allows us to easily plug in third-party AI models for things like predictive call routing, churn analysis and highly individualized customer price increases.
Q: If you had to summarize the value Wavelytics provides for your organization in one powerful sentence, what would it be?
A: "The benefit of Wavelytics is it's really allowed us to bend time and move faster; it allows us to fully utilize all of our data across our entire business, adopt new technologies and really future-proof our business for the years to come."
